African-American novel wins Irish literature prize

DUBLIN, June 11 (Reuters) - Michael Thomas won one of
English language fiction's richest prizes on Thursday for a
novel depicting the difficulty of attaining the American Dream
for an African American.

The unnamed first person narrator, once a promising Harvard
student and now an impoverished construction worker in Brooklyn,
is married to a white woman with whom he has three children.

He is "not fallen but standing on the precipice", according
to the IMPAC judges' citation.
"It is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what
it's like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to
escape that sentence," the book's U.S. publisher Grove Atlantic
says on its website.

Thomas, whose novel was nominated for the prize by the
National Library Service of Barbados, said the American Dream
can be variously defined, but the credit crisis has certainly
pushed African Americans even further from it.

"One of the things I hope are taken away from reading the
book is there are different American dreams," Thomas told
Reuters. "One being materialism which this narrator does not
really have, it's more the African American striving for
freedom," he said in an interview.

"If not from slavery then from segregation, if not from
segregation then from stereotype, if not from stereotype then
from glass ceilings and redline mortgages."

SOCIAL PROBLEMS

To "redline" can mean to refuse home mortgages to entire
neighbourhoods deemed too poor, a term that has acquired
significance in the credit crisis, one of whose main causes were
financial products based on "subprime" mortgages.

The fact that Barack Obama has become the first
African-American president of the United States is not going to
solve such social problems at once, though it is a symbolic
victory, Thomas said.

"Maybe it's a message of hope that finally we have a
president of intellect and philosophical heft rather than
didactic, meanspirited, short-sighted small-mindedness," he
said.

The IMPAC prize, established in 1994 by Dublin City Council
and sponsored by U.S. company IMPAC, was last year won by
Lebanese novelist Rawi Hage with "De Niro's Game", a tale of
childhood in wartorn Beirut. [ID:nL12823051]

Asked to pick out some of the most important features of his
work -- a New York Times top ten book of 2007 -- Thomas said: